


a night, a night, a night again (but always, always a day at the end)

by bibliomaniac



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Heavy Angst, Suicidal Thoughts, basically lucretia having late-night suicidal ideation, if that's the sort of thing that gets to you please don't read this, it's very frank about it so please be careful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-04-07 19:46:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14088336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bibliomaniac/pseuds/bibliomaniac
Summary: Late at night, Lucretia's mind goes in circles, and then it goes downwards, and it drags her with it.She gets through it.(aka a vent fic about suicidal ideation)





	a night, a night, a night again (but always, always a day at the end)

**Author's Note:**

> i hesitate to even post this because i really am not too fond of talking about how bad i get sometimes, and this is undoubtedly a lucretia export of what i experience. my depression is really not a secret, and it's not exactly something i'm ashamed of, but it also makes people sad when they hear about this sort of thing, and i hate making people feel sad about me.
> 
> ultimately i'm posting this because i had a very very bad night the other day and i didn't know if i'd get through it but i did, and i really want to be able to remind myself about that in the future. there are terrible terrible nights, but if you sleep, theres a morning too.
> 
> please stay safe reading this; it has a hopeful uptick at the end, but most of it is really very dark.
> 
> also, a special shoutout to my friend michelle (who won't read this) and the tfw (who might), for being wonderfully bright forces in my life. you're the best part about the morning, and i love you all!

The thing about suicide is that once you’ve thought about it—not just in passing, when you’ve really seriously considered it—you never really quite stop.

It doesn’t even have to be serious. _Today was awful and my head hurts. How about you just kill yourself? You’re out of your favorite snack, and you’re really hungry. If you killed yourself, you wouldn’t be hungry anymore. You only can find one sock and you’re going to be so late and you hate being late. You know, killing yourself is an option here._

_You took all of your friend’s memories without their consent and you will never be worthy of forgiveness._

_Maybe you should just kill yourself._

It’s not always something she thinks too hard about. She’s thought it so many times, and she's bat the thought aside like a particularly irritating fly just as many. But there are—some nights. There are some nights, too late for anybody to be awake and too far from the morning to justify waking anybody up and too far from rationality to stop herself, that she thinks, and she keeps thinking.

Maybe you should just kill yourself.

…Maybe she should.

The thoughts circle around, restless and entirely cyclical, and they all lead to the same place. As soon as the thought comes, and as soon as she doesn’t immediately dismiss it, all the token protests come rushing in after. It’s the sort of things that usually would stop her from thinking any more about it, but these nights, there’s always a reason why it’s not enough. _People would miss you._ Would they? _You know they would._ They’d get over it. _You know how much you’re still affected by the people you’ve lost._ The people I’ve lost were much better than I’ll ever be.

Which cuts right down to the quick of it, doesn’t it? Because the issue isn’t that life isn’t worth living. It’s never been that. Life can be terrible, but it’s beautiful in a way how it all flows, how it adapts to everything. The people who live in it are beautiful too: complex and flawed and sometimes broken, but always moving, always growing.

Life is worth living. She just doesn’t think she’s worthy of living it.

It’s not news to her that she hates herself. It’s been a constant for forever—or maybe not forever, maybe not when she was young, but for long enough that she doesn’t know anything else. She doesn’t even know who she would _be_ if she didn’t detest herself with every fiber of her being. Would she a person worthy of being liked then? Would she be anybody at all? 

It doesn’t even bear thinking about, she decides, because it’s not something that will ever happen.

_You’re always going to be like this. You’re never going to change. Everybody who loves you, everybody who says you’re not a bad person—they only say that because they don’t know who you really are. They only say that because you’ve fooled them into thinking it. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Twist people around you, manipulate them into caring, then hurt them? That’s all you’ve ever done, is hurt people. You’re a monster. You’re an abomination. Everybody would be so much better off without you. Maybe they’d be sad at first, but eventually they’ll come to realize how much better they are without you._

_Killing yourself would be the one good thing you ever did in your sorry fucking life._

She cries, these nights, and she’s never sure whether she’s crying because she’s sad or because she doesn’t want to kill herself or because she doesn’t have the courage to do it. Her mind circles, circles. Every day she stays alive becomes an act of cowardice when usually she tries to see it as an act of strength. Every time she’s tried to talk to someone, anyone at all about anything at all, becomes a web she’s trapped someone in instead of a desperate attempt to moor herself to a world she increasingly does not know how to navigate.

She knows the IPRE crew knows what’s going on, to an extent. Lup and Barry check in on her in her self-imposed isolation every week. Magnus, too, every now and then, though usually over the stone of far speech. Davenport, Merle, Taako—fuck, _Taako_ —they don’t really talk to her much anymore, but she knows they know. They’re clever. And the employees that have remained in what’s left of the Bureau—she sees them trying to make conversation with her on days she leaves her quarters, she sees them trying to joke like old times and include her in their gatherings. All of it only makes her heart hurt all the more. She doesn’t deserve to have people kind enough to deal with her going out of their way to accommodate her bullshit. She doesn’t deserve them. She doesn’t deserve anything. 

The circles turn into spirals, a whirlpool that sucks her down so far she never quite knows if this will be the night she doesn’t swim back up. _You hurt your friends. You lied to everybody. You still do. You were given everything and you’ve spit on all of it. You were given so many chances and you ruined all of them. You were given a family and you destroyed them._

_You were given a life, and you royally fucked it up, so now you have to be the one to take it._

Tears continue falling, broken, choked sobs, as she stares up at the ceiling curled up in her bed. The voice in her mind may have been a whisper once, but now it’s shouting, and every word echoes around her brain and reverberates around its confines. _It would be so easy. It would be so easy to leave. You wouldn’t have to feel like this anymore. You would never have to hurt another person again. It would be so good. It would be so beautiful. It would be so nice to die. A well-placed spell could do it. Maybe poison. Maybe you take the Starblaster up until you can barely see any of the planes anymore and then you jump off. Maybe something sharp._

And she’s nearly dizzy with it as she weakly thinks back, _no, no, I don’t want them to see me like that, don’t want them to have to clean up the mess—and it’s late and I would have to write a note and—_

_Nobody wants to fucking hear from you. You’ve done enough writing to last a lifetime. You’ve done enough writing to cause several lifetimes of damage. You can be done. You can be done._

_All you need to do is kill yourself before the sun comes up._

And that’s the thing, is she knows she won’t do it in the daytime. These thoughts won’t have changed, and nothing will be better, but in the daytime there’s things to _do,_ there’s people who talk to her and the thoughts that keep the other thoughts at bay are a little stronger, but the nighttime voice speaks even louder now until she has to cover her ears. **_So you’re just going to go to sleep again like a fucking coward and wake up and pretend it’s all right? You’re just going to prolong this by another day, another week, that much more time for you to inflict even more pain? You’re selfish. You’re awful. If you were a good person, you would have died such a long time ago._**

All she needs to do is go to sleep, the much smaller voice whispers. All she needs to do is sleep, and when she wakes up she can go back to managing. Day by day. Hour by hour. Minute by minute, second by second if she needs to, but she can manage, and she’ll have made it through the night. All she needs to do is sleep.

She doesn’t sleep. She doesn’t deserve sleep either. She doesn’t deserve an easy way out of any of this. She stays awake and lets her thoughts circle.

It’s different every night this happens, what ends up getting her to the sunrise. Sometimes it’s just that her eyes are heavy from crying and she falls asleep without it being a conscious decision. Sometimes she makes a list, a list of reasons to stay alive—things like how the Bureau employees would have to find a replacement and that would be a clerical nightmare, or how she had promised Lup her recipe for garbanzo salad and that Lup wouldn’t be able to get it from her belongings because it’s in a drawer that’s spelled shut (for some reason; she should really get it out). Sometimes it’s looking over the portrait of all of them on the Starblaster and thinking, _fuck, I can’t do this to them tonight, Kravitz has a concert with that community orchestra and he and Taako would have to miss it for the funeral they would insist on having and he would be so pissed, and Merle is having the kids over this weekend, and Istus knows Mookie doesn’t have something funeral-appropriate. And where would they put the ashes, anyway, I’d have to scout out a location that was central to all of them in case any of them ever wanted to visit…_ Sometimes it’s starting to write a note and realizing she has too many people she would have to write something to, and wondering how she can balance out the length so that nobody feels neglected or like she hasn’t given them proper thought, and then concluding this would really have to be a multi-day endeavor. 

It’s never that she wants to stay, never that, but in the end, she still wakes up to the weak strains of sunlight.

Inserting herself back into the flow of things is always so strange when she had so thoroughly expected to take herself out of it the evening prior. She talks quietly and rarely, and she wonders, _how did I use to do this? How did I use to talk to these people? Did I joke, did I say things that showed I cared?_

She works on paperwork, and the white of the paper seems distant as she stares at it, and she thinks, _do I just do this the rest of my life? How did I make myself care about any of this? Was I pretending, or was it actually something that mattered to me?_

She walks through the day in a daze, detached and barely occupying her body, and she observes as everybody gets along without her there, and she spends the evening thinking of how refreshing it is to know she is not needed, but too passive to act. 

She wakes up again. 

And this day, it is better. This day she begins to remember why she’s been trying to stay alive all this time. This day she remembers why she fights.

It is not better in the normal sense of the word. She still hates herself. She still doesn’t know how to reconcile what she did with still being around to face those she did it to. She’s still depressed, and she still doesn’t know really what the point of living is. She knows there are so many nights ahead of her, and some of those nights might bring her down again. 

But right now, it is the morning, and she has an entire day ahead of her, and then a weekend where she will sneak in to see Kravitz’s orchestra and let the music sweep over her, and then a month where she will start to leave her room at least once per day, and then a year where she will visit Lup and Barry, and then a decade, and then her entire life. 

She doesn’t know any of that yet, and she can’t think about it yet, either. A life is such a terribly long thing sometimes. Thinking about being alive, about all of that time spent fighting, about all of the nights spent spiraling, is enough to make panic rise in her. She can’t do a lifetime right now.

But a day—a day she can do.


End file.
